You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Joyce McDougall is a New Zealander who has worked for many years in Paris where she is a training analyst of the Paris Psychoanalytic Society. I had looked forward to reading Theatres of the Mind because of its engaging theme and title. This promise was not disappointed in the Prologue: The Psychic Theatre and the Psychoanalytic Stage. She begins with Shakespeare ‘All the world's a stage’ and says:
Each of us harbors in our inner universe a number of ‘characters’, parts of ourselves that frequently operate in complete contradiction to one another, causing conflict and mental pain to our conscious selves. For we are relatively unacquainted with these hidden players and their roles. Whether we will it or not, our inner characters are constantly seeking a stage on which to play out their tragedies and comedies. Although we rarely assume responsibility for our secret theater productions, the producer is seated in our own minds. Moreover, it is this inner world with its repeating repertory that determines most of what happens to us in the external world. (p. 4)
I agree this is a useful metaphor in which to think of analysis and psychotherapy as a playing out of dramas between internal objects and imagoes on the psychic stage of transference. She reminds us that Breuer's famous patient Anna 0 referred to her daydreams and free associations as ‘my private theatre’. This in turn reminded me of an expression of her French colleague Pontalis (1974) who referred to the ‘private theatre’ of transference.
In the Prologue, too, she refers to the renunciation involved in the ending of therapy in ‘coming to terms with forbidden and impossible wishes (which) requires in each case a mourning process’ (p. 12). And in the Epilogue, when as she puts it at the end of analysis ‘the actors take off their costumes and return to their dressing rooms’ (p. 285), this is again reminiscent of Shakespeare:
Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits, and
Are melted i